The European Research Council... An Open Door For The Sociology Of 21st Century?

The European Research Council is the most recent and most successful Funding Body created by the European Union. Why successful? Because it allows the funding of single research teams in all fields of Science (up to 2.5 million EUR for a 5 years project) and it is the sole EU funding body directed by a Council of top-notch Scientists.

The author is for now more than 5 years the Scientific Coordinator of the so-called SH2 Panel, bringing together 15 panellists – from Sociology but also from Anthropology, STS, Political Science, Religious Studies, Law and Communication Studies – in charge of evaluating between 120 to 200 proposals.

The way the ERC assesses proposals - singularly in Sociology – is quite peculiar and tends to blur boundaries between disciplines.

The evaluation procedure is done in 2 steps and, at step 1, each proposal is given to 4 reviewers. The latter are, frequently, not specialists from the main proposal’s discipline. It follows, from that, debates among them not only about the excellence of the proposal but also about its relevance in confront with its subject, hypotheses or methods.

This fruitful interdisciplinary debate 1) helps panellists understanding each other point of view while bringing them, in most cases, to a consensual decision about any given proposal; 2) gives interesting hints about the various paradigms in use in disciplines apparently close from each other; 3) raises a lot of questions about the fact that some disciplines seem more “successful” than others and 4) allows to grasp at best that having reviewers from different disciplines can have paradoxical effects for interdisciplinary proposals.

Such a debate is undoubtedly helping outlining the main features of Sociology as a discipline increasingly aware of the needed ‘porosity’ of its own boundaries and, by extension, of the other social sciences’ ones.